Roblox defends expanded safety checks but parents are concerned

Yes this just let's Predators target specific age groups now.

I would challenge someone to design a system worse than telling the world which accounts are child accounts. 

Yes and some kids were accidentally age verified as adults. So they can only talk to adults! I’m very upset about the lack of parental notice or consent. Luckily my child knew to come to me and ask before verifying. It was a no- we don’t post him online and he knows not to divulge personal info.

I wonder if 2 adults faking to be kids ever target each other.

yes. Are you truly surprised liars are not interested in protecting children even though they say that is what it is for?

You have to cut off communication like Nintendo does. Require friend codes and such. Not perfect but better.

Not to forget the makers themselves are protecting predators. Game has its own fair share of issues as is with all the brainrot and I'm definitely not sending my kids on there when I do have them. Makes me wonder what the parents are so busy doing to not know what their kids are upto.

Those greedy fucks are doing next to literal nothing and you call it an impossible task?!? Not to mention the actual community yelling the solutions to them and they stonewall it all to pump stock.

Excuse me? Roblox shut down their forums because they couldn't be arsed to moderate them, knowing full well that the kids would just move to 3rd places like Discord where they are even more at risk. I don't think it's an easy task, either, but Roblox has been doing *less than nothing* to make it safer. In fact they've actively been making it worse, since the same mechanism that leaves children vulnerable to abuse also makes it easier for them to spend their parents' money. They *want* unsupervised children, that's their entire business model.

It doesn't help that Roblox's leadership largely didn't (and honestly still doesn't) care about doing proper Trust & Safety work on their platform since it's hard and expensive to do right. Roblox leadership is very "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

If they really cared, they’d shut down the private chat features entirely, moderate the games themselves for content better, and put a heavy-handed filter on in-game chat. The kids are already on it, make the parents comfortable allowing their kids on a kids game with less supervision

Solving it is impossible, but making it slightly better would be as simple as rolling back the features they CHOSE to add in the last few years like a less restrictive chat filter and voice chat.

Yep! Not to forget parental controls have existed for decades now and work just fine. Someone even made a decent proposal to have kids safe without this c*** by mandating enabling parental controls on all wifi routers off the shelf where the users can choose to turn it off. As a gamer myself, yeah there is a better middle ground than a ban. Which is where I found the whole social media ban stupid. Like instagram has had parental control support for a decent amount of time now. Better to teach them how to be responsible and safe than banning it completely.

So many clueless parents not only let their young kids play these games, but they also let them chat online.... like why? Have some common sense. My wifes cousins kid is 6 and had apparently been playing fortnight online for a year or so and also was talking to other players... So this 6 year old is hearing the fucked up shit other older kids are saying. And that kid.... had issues. Like the things he talked about were dark for a kid his age. 

They could I did. I feel like the odds of something bad happening on Roblox is lower than at school / daycare / church groups, but it’s just easier to blame a corporation than local community groups and lazy parents .

I had to go out of my way to explicitly block it because Microsoft explicitly allows kids to fully install it without admin privileges. Microsoft also doesn't let you block it until they have used it.

Easier said than done. The more you protect your kids from the internet, the more they're going to get pressured and bullied by their peers.

We let our kids play roblox. I play with them sometimes too. We just dont let them add strangers as friends or DM anyone. They can use microsft teams to chat with friends and family while they play or use the public chat. Predators have always and will always exist. Parents need to pay attention to what their kids are doing. God i can remember when internet was first starting and every AOL chat or IIRC started with announcing your A/S/L. Lol. And my parents were completely clueless to what this stuff even was. No supervision at all. Speaking of supervising kids, i was taking my daughter to a friends house and had to wait while like a 4 year and 6 year old finished playing in the road. No parents in site. Im digressing now but the point is some parents just suck and good luck to those kids raised by them.

Also, ironically it's been proven that there is a bigger chance of parents and siblings or step siblings to sexually assault you or put you in a bigger position to be assaulted than the internet. Not just kids but adults too, I see the same thing it's super dangerous to use dating apps but the perpetrators are always someone you know. Not saying Internet it's super safe, just saying we need actual effective strategy that actually works.

Yes, but it’s not a game - it’s a platform that hosts a walled garden of games. It’s important for parents to know this and understand there’s a lot of corners to be in.

Microsoft has explicitly gone out of their way to allow kids to download and install the game on child accounts without parental permission. It's one of the very few software that does this. No admin access required, full installation including running things in the background even when logged in on parent accounts.

There's only so much they can do, but they did do some of it at one point. They ADDED unsafe features and REMOVED perfectly fine safety features. They also replaced a ton of human moderation. They also choose not to be in this situation. They are a platform with almost half of the user base under 14, they allow account creation with ages 8 and up & they sell official toys.

Fortnite doesn’t have a robust text chat system. Fortnite communication is mostly voice chat, and typically you’re playing with friends not strangers. Even then if you’re doing squads or duos, you’re only coming across a handful of people a day compared to Roblox maps that can have hundreds or thousands of users in a given map.